April 18, 2017 AT 1:00 pm

‘Reverse Prisma’ AI turns Monet paintings into photos #ArtTuesday

Teams at UC Berkeley are using AI to convert stunning painted landscapes into more realistic looking photos, and vice versa. Shared from engaget:

Impressionist art is more about feelings than realism, but have you ever wondered what Monet actually saw when he created pieces like Low Tide at Varengeville (above)? Thanks to researchers from UC Berkeley, you don’t need to go to Normandy and wait for the perfect light. Using “image style transfer” they converted his impressionist paintings into a more realistic photo style, the exact opposite of what apps like Prisma do. The team also used the same AI to transform a drab landscape photo into a pastel-inflected painting that Monet himself may have executed.

The most interesting aspect of the research is the fact that the team used what’s called “unpaired data.” In other words, they don’t have a photo taken at the scene at the exact moment Monet did his painting. “Instead, we have knowledge of the set of Monet paintings of of the set of landscape photographs. We can reason about the stylistic differences between those two sets, and thereby imagine what a scene might look like if we were to translate it from one set into another.”